An Explanation of Sorts

While we were on vacation (and oh, was it lovely and a true respite from the crazy edge of daily life), I scheduled a stop on our mail because while I don't believe that the letter carrier (or mail carrier or postal worker - what is the current politically correct term for mailman?!) is casing our house, I didn't want to leave it to chance.

That, and there is something just plain fun about getting a huge pile of mail to sort through after being gone for a week. Seriously. Or am I just weird like that?*

One of the treasures I found hidden in our bundle of bills, catalogs, and junk mail was my latest copy of Writer's Digest. I recently subscribed...again. I've been a subscriber to Writer's Digest on and off for the past ten years. Here's a chart that best describes the pattern of my behavior:

Note that I didn't have room to add the delays in my writing career due to creative procrastination**.

Anyhow, I put WD to one side, waiting for that blessed hour after all of my small people would be tucked away in bed and the daily tasks of laundry, emailing, dishes, and prepping the Mr. Coffee for early am duty would be done. An issue of WD is something to savor, peeps.

To savor.

I flipped through it idly first, reading snippets about markets here and agents there. I ignored the BREAKOUT author section (see chart above, *cough* GAG), and simply skimmed the first time through, making a mental note of what articles I wanted to come back to and read more thoroughly, more carefully.

But one small thing caught my eye, one line that gave me complete pause.

This line:

"Every word on your blog is a word not in your book."

Ouch.

It's true, though.

For me, at least, the simple truth is that fiction and blogging are two very diverse and almost incompatible forms of writing. As I mentioned to my friend Lynn the other day (a real life friend who is a mom, a writer, and a blogger so she understood what I meant immediately), there is only so much room in my brain. I'm the classic example of why multi-tasking leads to lower - not greater - effectiveness.

So, I've been doing some noodling and organizing*** over the past two weeks since we returned from vacation, thinking about writing and blogging and what it is I want to do. And, the trickier, $64,000 question, what it is I'm supposed to do.

I've also been writing - WRITING - and while my pace has been glacial, it feels promising. Dear God, I hope I didn't just totally jinx myself by saying that. Do me a favor - if you see me soon in real life, don't ask. Just pretend I'm the still the slightly dippy blonde you know and love. I promise to let you know when I type THE END, k?

So, blogging. I'll still be blogging here because it is such excellent therapy for me and because every once in a while, my offspring do something so stellar or so stellar-ly silly that it's worthy of recording for prosperity.****

But my other blog will be mothballed for the time being. Which is fine and good and necessary. There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in a lifetime.

And if I don't swing for the fences doing what I knew at the age of five that God made me to do, I know I'll always regret it.

*Probably.

**This little graphic would have taken half the time to create if I hadn't needed to hide in the laundry room after failing to locate my 4 year old's paper airplane that became wedged under the oven on it's maiden voyage. I did, however, locate a broken rubber band, six cheerios, and far too many dust bunnies to enumerate here.

***Including my makeshift writing space in the laundry room where I sit perched on a bar stool with my laptop on my dryer. It's not terribly comfy but it is small, quiet, and tidy.

****Me: Tom, you cannot, you simply CANNOT take off ALL of your clothes when you go to the bathroom at preschool. PROMISE me!
Tom: Ok, ok. {insert sly giggling cackle HERE}